The management of sleep problems

Abstract

There is a wide variety in the amount of sleep that an individual needs and variety too in patterns of sleeping and waking. However, regularly recurring inactivity in all of us is usually accompanied by sleep. This recurrence of inactivity is a rhythm that the body learns through experience. Sleep is considered by most of us as a restoring function. Oswald (1970) reminds us that it restores the body after physical labour and that we ‘sleep’ on a problem. He goes on to tell us that there are two kinds of sleep, paradoxical and orthodox and that we all have recurring cycles of each during each night. Orthodox sleep may be a time of special importance for restoration of many body tissues. Paradoxical sleep when we dream, he suggests, may be a time of restoration of brain tissue.